“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Many difficulties arise when you compare yourselves to stylized or idealized versions of yourselves—to composite images of yourselves that you may have picked up along the way—a subject that we have mentioned earlier.

Such images have little to do with your own basic or natural personalities, or with your own individual backgrounds, but you apply such images upon yourselves like overlays. In such cases you are unable to really estimate your own progress of your own accomplishments, for you are not looking at them based upon your own capabilities and inclinations, but using the hypothetical idealized images instead.

He may think of some hypothetical literary writer—a composite image again, comfortable enough, slightly avant-garde, fashionably so, in contact with his peers, quite forgetting again that his—and his mind has always been far less conventional than that, far more probing and again, forgetting that he always enjoyed viewing society from a vantage point slightly outside of it.

As a rule, psychics are not particularly good writers. He tries to view his own work through some idealized image of a psyche who is as gifted as he is as a writer, and also highly gifted in meeting the public, putting on performances, acting as a healer, as a prophet, and as an expert therapist all at once, and in so doing his own characteristics and natural abilities and inclinations become lost along the way.

All of these issues are important. You should always address yourself to the natural person, and when Ruburt becomes confused about images, it is because he is relating himself to other composite versions that he thinks he should live up to.

(Long pause at 9:48.) Give us a moment.... (Long pause.) The strain of trying to live up to such images causes tension, of course. It also causes feelings of self-disapproval, where a constant reminder of one’s background puts current situations at least into perspective. Now Ruburt’s body is trying to rid itself of those tensions, and he is learning to let go of them, and with your help, which lately has been considerable.

(Pause at 9:58.) There are considerable freedoms available to you that you ignore because your connections with those idealized images governs some of your joint reactions. I will discuss some of those at a later time.